3.5 years of veganism didn’t just leave me exhausted, depressed, and very sick, it also filled my head with doubts and questions about the ethics of veganism. If I actually need to eat animals to be healthy, how can it be so wrong? It has been a complicated and eye-opening journey, and I now find myself in a much different place than I was 3 years ago, a year ago, or even several months ago. Perhaps if my health hadn’t improved so dramatically upon the reintroduction of animal flesh I wouldn’t be so sure, but it did improve remarkably, and now that I have my life and my happiness back, I will never give it up again. Ultimately, I can no longer think it is wrong to eat animals...

...When I stumbled along this quote about veganism by Megan Mackin it seemed as if it had been written for me: “It begins, eventually, to look like a very effective way to co-opt a movement: take the most passionate activist-minded, girls especially, and get their focus on a way of living that drains energies and enforces conformity in others. The Big Boys still run things, but now even more freely – with out much interference.”

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- An ex-vegan who was hit with chili pepper-laced pies at an anarchist event in San Francisco said Tuesday that her assailants were cowards who should direct their herbivorous rage at the powerful - not at a fellow radical for writing a book denouncing animal-free diets.

Lierre Keith, a 45-year-old Arcata resident, was attacked at 2:15 p.m. Saturday at the 15th annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair while discussing her 2009 book, "The Vegetarian Myth." A 20-year vegan, Keith now argues that the diet is unhealthy and that agriculture is destroying the world.

As Keith stood at a lectern at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, three people in masks and black hooded sweatshirts ran from backstage, shouted, "Go vegan!" and threw pies in her face. While they fled, some in the audience cheered or handed out leaflets.

The attack, midway through a 30-minute talk, was captured on a video posted to YouTube and prompted blistering debates on radical Web sites.

Many people defended Keith - or at least her right not to be attacked. Others said she was dishonest and abusive to vegans and should not have been invited by the event organizer, San Francisco's Bound Together bookstore.

Police are investigating the incident but have made no arrests, a spokesman said. Keith said she did not go to a hospital and was able to speak at a second engagement later Saturday, but had sore eyes for a few days and developed an ear infection.

"The whole thing was designed for social humiliation," said Keith, speaking Tuesday from her sister's home in Kansas. "We're supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me."

Keith said her values are similar in most ways to those of her attackers. She believes in militant action, even property destruction, if it can lead to change. In her book, she said, she railed against factory farming and promoted the restoration of prairies and forests.

"It's insane. My entire book is about how the world is being destroyed," Keith said. She said the first pie hit her just after she uttered the sentence, "You should not eat factory-farmed meat."

Among those rejoicing in the pie attack was the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which often prints communiques from activists taking credit for attacks on animal researchers.

The group said Keith was wrong about veganism, referred to her as an "animal holocaust denier," and scolded her for calling the "agents of state oppression" - the police.

Her assailants were "masked marvels" who "made their statement very eloquently and succinctly on behalf of the billions of animals she advocates killing," the group said.

Keith said the attack appeared to have been planned on Internet sites dedicated to veganism. She called it a case of infighting that harmed activist causes.

"If this is what is considered radical action," she said, "this movement is dead."

I've never thrown a pepper-filled pie in the face of an ape who disagreed with me. I'm surprised they didn't throw poo.

Granted, PETA’s main function isn’t to run as an adoption agency, but eight animals? That’s just shameful. Where’s the ethical treatment in that? Was something wrong with them? Terminal illness? Injuries? Behavioral issues? Aggression? Were all of the dogs Pit bulls?

According to Daphna Nachminovitch, vice president of cruelty investigations at PETA, their euthanasia program isn’t any big secret. She also adds that money can’t buy a good home.

Maybe not, but with $34 million in the bank, surely more of an effort could have been made. Maybe by spending less on things like billboards that shame women into giving up meat by calling them whales…because only skinny people care about animals?

"It's whoring itself out for media coverage," David Martosko, director of research at the Center for Consumer Freedom, said of PETA. "They'll do the ridiculous stuff, but they won't put an ad in the Norfolk press saying, 'We have puppies and kittens, come adopt one.'"

I shed a tear of confusion over the fact that I just agreed with CCF’s mouthpiece Martosko, the very same man who said that animal abuse is alright, just as long as no one sees it, it’s the undercover investigators that must be stopped. However, on this point, he may just be right.

Even with up to 8 million cats and dogs making their way into shelters, others also disagree and are looking to the No Kill movement as an answer. (Check out Sharon Seltzer’s post Is Pet Overpopulation Really Killing Our Cats and Dogs?)

PETA may make a lot of money, use shock value and sex as a means of getting a message across, but they haven’t changed the dialogue about animal cruelty or a compassionate and healthy lifestyle in a real way. Instead, they make everyone else who cares about the cause and thinks that sentient beings should be treated with kindness and respect while being allowed to live free of exploitation look stupid. Which is unfortunate, because it’s a cause worth defending with integrity, logic and education.

They push people away from the message of compassion while offending them at the same time by employing misogynistic tactics that degrade women, which does nothing for animals, insulting everyone’s intelligence and flushing any credible message and argument down the drain rather than using rational thoughts or asking people to put on their critical thinking caps and ponder why pigs and cows are so different from dogs and cats, which is truly sad, mostly for the animals they’re claiming to help.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

An animal rights "fanatic" was behind the planting of petrol bombs at Oxford University as part of a terrorist campaign to stop the building of a £20m research laboratory, a court heard yesterday.

Using fuel and fuses made from sparklers, Mel Broughton worked with others to plant four devices in two separate attacks, a jury at Oxford crown court was told.

The bomb attacks were claimed by the Animal Liberation Front on its website, Bite Back, said John Price, prosecuting.

Broughton is alleged to have caused £14,000 worth of damage when the Queen's College sports pavilion blew up in November 2006. Two similar bombs were planted under a temporary building used as an office at Templeton College three months later but failed to go off.

Price told the jury that Broughton's DNA was found on one of the components used in the unexploded devices. He said police who searched his home in Northampton discovered items used in homemade explosives and a notebook containing a list of those people he had been targeting as part of a campaign known as Speak, to stop Oxford University building an animal testing laboratory.

"There is no dispute that he [Broughton] has dedicated his adult life to issues of animal rights," Price said. "He is a renowned, self-proclaimed activist, a fanatic. He is a - if not the - leading figure of Speak."

Price told the jury that Broughton, 48, had a history of possessing incendiary devices. He was convicted in 2000 at Northampton crown court of conspiracy to cause an explosion likely to endanger life.

So here's my new proposal for people who are so fine and wonderful and too pure for this world who want to end animal testing -- we're going to send you to a lovely tropical island where you'll never hear about it again.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Trevor passed this one along to me. PETA not specifically mentioned, but the idiot looking out for the psychological welfare of worms is certainly cut from the same cloth...

New Zealand toilet inventor flushes out worm worries

2 days ago

WELLINGTON (AFP) — The New Zealand inventor of a worm-driven composting toilet has flushed away concerns from bureaucrats that the system traumatised the wriggly creatures, local media reported Sunday.

Coll Bell, who built the "wormorator" as an alternative to septic tanks, was asked to get an expert's report on its mental impact on the tiger worms after an official became concerned during a site visit, the Sunday Star Times said.

"She felt that the worms were being unfairly treated, being expected to deal with human faeces, and that it could affect them in a psychological way," Bell told the newspaper.

"I said, 'Well, what do I do about that?' and she said, 'You have to have someone with the necessary qualifications to say the worms are happy'."

In Bell's invention, a colony of worms filters solids from the toilet waste and the leftover water is filtered into underground trenches.

The Auckland Regional Council's concerns went down the pan after vermiculture consultant Patricia Naidu found the worms in excellent health and breeding happily.

A council spokeswoman told the newspaper the worm worries were justified because the system was going to be used at a campground, where sewage flowed heavily for two weeks each year, with little during the rest of the year.

This reminds me of a story.

W.C. Fields was being interviewed in his home, and the interviewer said that he wanted his readers to have a real sense of who Fields was. "Do you have any hobbies?" he asked.

"Why yes, yes I do, young man. I find beekeeping very relaxing."

"Really?" said the interviewer.

"Oh yes," Fields replied. "At any given moment, I estimate that I have twenty to thirty thousand of the wee creatures here on the estate."

"Well, you just took me on a tour of the grounds, and I didn't see any hives..."

Thursday, September 27, 2007

SPOKANE, Wash. - A pet rabbit named Sugar Bunny was stolen from a preschool and fliers protesting circus animal acts were left in its empty cage.

The preschool's children gathered in a circle Monday to remember Sugar Bunny.

"We talked about how some people have different ideas about animals," said teacher Lori Peters. "Some people don't think they should be in cages."

Did they talk about how some people can't tell the difference between the kinds of animals you see in a school and the kind you see at the circus? Did they talk about people who are too chickenshit to steal bears from the circus, so they steal children's bunnies from school?

Sugar Bunny vanished from the Community Building Children's Center on Saturday, teachers said.

"Somebody stoled him," 5-year-old Zion told The Spokesman-Review, which gave only the first names of him and other children in a report on the heist. "I'm sad."

The fliers expressed protests against the Ringling Brothers Circus, which was in town during the weekend, and had a picture of a bear trying to escape from a cage. The fliers bore the names of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Northwest Animal Rights Network.

"Is a bear the same thing as a bunny, boys and girls? No, a bear is different from a bunny, isn't it? Would you see a bear in a cage in a classroom?"

Daphna Nachminovitch, director of PETA's domestic animal department, said the group would not endorse stealing a pet bunny.